EcoCart: Engineering Sustainability into the E-Commerce Checkout

The Vision

EcoCart came to us with a mission: make sustainability accessible to every online shopper. They needed a Shopify app that could calculate the carbon footprint of any order in real-time and offer the customer an option to offset it during checkout.

Technical Implementation

Working within the constraints of the Shopify checkout liquid and the new Checkout Extensions, we built a highly optimized application. The core calculation engine runs on AWS Lambda to ensure it can handle sudden bursts of traffic without impacting the store's conversion rate.

Key Innovations:

• Storefront Integration: Seamlessly injected widgets that don't slow down the PageSpeed Insights score.
• Complex Calculations: An algorithm that considers weight, distance, and product type to estimate CO2 emissions.
• Merchant Dashboard: A comprehensive React-based dashboard for merchants to track their collective environmental impact.

Impact

EcoCart is now used by over 500 Shopify Plus merchants. It has successfully offset over 1 million tonnes of CO2 and has become a gold standard for sustainability apps in the Shopify ecosystem.